Artificial intelligence was a major factor in the strike of actors in 2023 and prosperous technology will remain a major element in negotiations next year.
Denkan Crabteri Erland, SAG-Aftra president, laid some union plans before holding them with studios in June 2026.
Speaking to a committee that was presented at the pluscinemaz.comat Seriesfest in Denver, CrabTree-RELAND, the national executive director and chief negotiator at SAG-Aftra, said that the union “will start our preparations for negotiations this fall.”
He believed that artificial intelligence would be an important factor in these conversations. “I never judged that, because our members – we are a paid organ – we decide what our priorities will be. We did not get everything I wanted [in 2023]Or they wanted this negotiation. This develops over time. In the commercial contract that we just obtained, we have first achieved contractual restrictions on the use of our members' work to train artificial intelligence systems. This is not something we have been able to achieve in any prior contract yet.
In the SAG-Aftra TV/theatrical contract, protection against studios and females was recorded by using artificial intelligence in a way that would lead to losses in jobs or violation of artists or as Crabtree -ireland called “approval and compensation”.
In the 2025 commercials contract that was just approved by the SAG-Aftra National Council, it secured the protection that forces advertisers or agencies to request the SAG-Aftra permission before they can allow any third parties to use these materials to train the AI system.
“We would like to have this in the TV theatrical agreement. We were unable to achieve this despite the strike for more than four months. But I now believe with the development of this industry, with the development of technology, and with the development of our contracts really, we may be able to improve in areas where everyone was also afraid, frankly, afraid to reach the agreement before, and we want to want to do so. It has become very important, and I think it served it Our organs are well, but we are always in the mood of improving our contracts every time. ”
Crabtree -ireland was speaking alongside Scott Mann, Co-COO & Norder, Flawless and Nikola Todorovic, co-founder and executive director of Wonder Dynamics.
He agreed that studios and rotation have followed a relatively cautious approach to the use of artificial intelligence in the past 18 months. SAG-Aftra sat with these companies several times since the deal to discuss artificial intelligence, as shown in their contract.
“It was more careful absorption than I was expecting at first. I think part of that is driven by the constraints and contractual rules that we have. I think it may be a large part of it, during the strikes, it became really clear that the audience avoids avoiding, avoiding, avoiding it, avoiding it, avoiding avoiding, or experiments to avoid, avoid avoiding, or avoiding avoiding. Frankly, I can. Because I think if we work together in this offer, it may be much better than it was in the rush of gold. “
